Emissions Tests To Skip Areas In Lake, Kane, Will

June 30, 1990|By Rick Pearson and Daniel Egler, Chicago Tribune.

SPRINGFIELD — House Republicans won a tailpipe-testing tussle over their Senate GOP counterparts when lawmakers agreed Friday to remove some communities from an expanded vehicle-emissions testing program as the General Assembly neared adjournment of its spring legislative session.

Attempting to meet its scheduled June 30 deadline for the first time since 1970, the General Assembly also approved a set of environmental standards and a tax on new municipal incinerators, although a controversial proposed Robbins waste plant would be exempted from the tax.

The Senate, on a test vote that paved the way for further negotiations and potential political trade-offs, rejected a plan to appropriate $70 million for marinas, including $40 million for Navy Pier, an additional $10 million for the Tri-County state park in Cook, Du Page and Kane Counties and $12 million for Redwing Slough, a 2,000-acre privately owned marshland area in Lake County.

Still awaiting final legislative action as the General Assembly met into Saturday`s early morning hours was a Senate-passed proposal for a $250 million program to help 164 communities-including Joliet, Vernon Hills, Bensenville and Aurora-improve their public water supplies and $100 million for school construction outside Cook County.

House Speaker Michael Madigan (D-Chicago), however, still opposed the marina and public-works projects, saying that it did not appear prudent to fund those last-minute projects in a tight budget year.

Expressing a desire not to prolong the session in the dispute on vehicle- emissions testing, Senate Republican Leader James ``Pate`` Philip of Wood Dale gave in to a demand from House GOP lawmakers that some communities be exempted from a measure to expand pollution-control tests throughout most of the Chicago metropolitan area.

``If you want to know the truth, I`m not going to stay around here until 4 o`clock in the morning arguing about it. If that`s going to hold up the whole legislative process, the hell with it,`` Philip said in throwing in the towel after the Senate sent the measure to the governor on a 44-7 vote.

Philip originally had proposed expanding the current vehicle emission testing program now required in Cook and parts of Du Page and Lake County, to include all of the six county metropolitan area except McHenry. House GOP Leader Lee Daniels of Elmhurst and suburban members of his caucus however, were ultimately successful in removing, by ZIP codes, areas in Lake, Kane and Will Counties they contended were primarily rural, with only 100,000 vehicles that did not significantly contribute to air pollution.

A side issue also involved a provision in the bill that would give the state the option of negotiating, without competitive bidding, a new contract with a California company that conducts emission testing. The company, Systems Control Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif., holds the $15 million-a-year testing contract and retained a number of influential lobbyists to keep intact the provision Daniels added to the bill.

Philip said he had received assurances from Gov. James Thompson that the five-year contract, to take effect Jan. 1, would be competitively bid.

The expanded emissions-testing measure also adjusts the frequency of what are now annual tests, by mandating cars to be tested when they are 3, 5 and 7 years old, and yearly thereafter. Under-the-hood tamper checks also would be instituted.

The current emissions program expires in January, and the expanded program is a result of a threatened loss of $350 million in federal highway funds if the state did not comply with a federal consent decree in a suit brought by Wisconsin.

Legislators also sent Thompson a measure to regulate new municipal incinerators, including the creation of a $1.05-a-ton tax on waste hauled to a plant for burning to pay for public information programs and household hazardous-waste collection in cities served by incinerators.

But the bill was carefully worded to exempt a proposed Robbins municipal incinerator from the tax

Senators, following the lead of the House a day earlier, also gave final approval to a bill that would make ``hate crimes,`` based on the race, religion, sexual orientation or disability of an individual, a felony punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

The legislature also completed action on a $26 billion budget for the fiscal year that begins Sunday. Lawmakers said the budget was balanced without any of the taxes Thompson had sought.

Also sent to Thompson`s desk was a bill allowing the Cook County Board to create a county fair financed with $525,000 in state funds.